forkboy

@onemanarmyy: Absolutely agree with you there. It seems like a fun little timewaster and I don't think $1 is asking too much for it. I might even pick it up at some point if I have some leftover change in my Steam wallet. Harmless.

@julius: Looking at history is black & white terms is dumb and deeply unhelpful. Marx got a lot wrong, especially the inevitability of collapse, and I'm not really a Marxist but that doesn't mean I can't take a nuanced look at history. Also, way to address the question about how if you're going to blame Marx for shit that happened decades after his death then why not Hegel & Kant & everyone who influenced everyone else in western philosophy.

I dunno man, what Marx have you read? Because you must have a really solid grounding in his works to come to a conclusion like everything he touched turned to shit decades after he died. And I'm not sure how you account that Marxist works still influence the field of sociology 140 odd years after his death. Never mind the influence he still has in economics. But on yerself.

I'll repeat it because you seem to be having trouble understanding this: The things that Stalin & Mao did are bad. Unequivocally. Lead to a whole lot of suffering & misery. You can't even justify that the end justified the means because the end was misery for millions. I'm also not exactly enamoured with Lenin, who had at least, if not more of an influence on the 20th century communist regimes that frankly did a lot of damage to the left wing movement with his ideas like the vanguard party & "democratic centralism", and nor do I concur with his maxim of "he who does not work shall not work". None of this actually discredits the ideas of Marx.

You can also go down the "Marx wasn't a Marxist" line but honestly, until you've acquainted yourself with some primary source Marx that's a discussion not even worth having.

That seems unnecessarily harsh on Dan. This is way below that level.

Holding Marx responsible for the crimes of Stalin & Mao & Hoxha & Pot makes as much sense as holding Adam Smith responsible for the crimes committed by capitalists throughout history, or Rousseau for the French Revolution & the bloodshed that followed. He was a philosopher, an economist & basically one of the creators of the field of sociology, not the leader of a genocidal regime. Marx I bet the OP has read barely a page of Marx, if that. If we use his logic then where does it stop? Do we go back to Hegel, whose ideas influenced a young Karl Marx? And then his predecessors in the German idealist movement, going back to Kant, one of the most influential names in modern western philosophy? And so on, right the way back to Socrates. It's absurd.

Just as the son cannot be held responsible for the sins of the father, so the father cannot be accountable for the sins of the son. Marx's ideas influenced lots of people who didn't lead genocidal regimes, there'd be no modern progressive social democracy without Marxism for starters.

@pogman: Jennifer Hale & I think Troy Baker are both SAG-AFTRA members. No idea about North. There is a reason people use these voice actors regularly, bad voice acting is worse than no voice acting. Having your devs do all the voice acting will lower the quality of your game.

I think the EA wives email/forum thread was the first time I became aware of quite how fucked up practices were in the games industry, and ever since then I've strongly felt that it needs to change. And as with all points in human history, I'm unsure as to how that will happen without workers organising and collectively negotiating. There is power in a union, as Joe Hill once wrote.

Even watching the Double Fine Adventure Game video series by 2 Player, once things start ramping up for crunch, and people are just never going home, it makes me angry. It's not just about how someone is paid but also how much they work, what is expected of them, etc. Something that desperately needs to change.

Basically, people in the industry should drop the crab mentality and realise that this can be a positive springboard to long overdue reform into working conditions, and maybe a change to the way that games are made into one that doesn't grind people down so fucking quickly. Nevermind that nobody does their best work when they pull at 14 hour shift starring at a computer monitor. It's a long overdue first step in an industry which is fucked up and completely takes advantage of peoples enthusiasm for being involved in game development. And hopefully that change could take effect on a wider basis in Silicon Valley. Though at some point it gets exceedingly unlikely as everyone becomes convinced they can be the next Mark Zuckerberg.